Arizona State University is increasing its synthetic intelligence research capabilities following a multimillion-dollar technology donation from Intel.
The donation, a part of ASU’s Changing Futures campaign to advance technology for good, helps a bigger college precedence to strengthen nationwide competitiveness in AI and increase entry to high-performance computing for researchers and college students.
The sizable {hardware} donation considerably will increase the size and adaptability of AI workloads ASU researchers can pursue, supporting bigger, extra advanced tasks throughout disciplines.
Intel and ASU have formed a long-standing partnership to address the U.S. semiconductor workforce shortage critical to economic competitiveness. The collaboration supports graduate and undergraduate research, educator training, curriculum development and experiential learning through industry mentorship, equipment donations and simulation tools.
By building an integrated talent pipeline from K–12 through higher education, the alliance demonstrates how coordinated industry–academic efforts can scale workforce solutions in advanced technology fields.
Expanding access for the research community
The new hardware underpins the ASU AI Research Acceleration Platform, or AIR Platform, a universitywide initiative aimed at removing barriers to advanced computing and broadening AI adoption and literacy among researchers. Led by ASU Knowledge Enterprise, the AIR Platform is a secure, open-access framework that pairs Intel’s hardware donation with ASU’s existing globally ranked Sol supercomputer.
Get started on ASU AI Research Platform
Researchers and staff can access AIR through CreateAI, the university’s AI tool kit. Launch the CreateAI Builder, start a “New AI Project” and select the Gemma4 31B IT model designated as ASU AIR.
“The AIR Platform isn’t just infrastructure — it’s a coordinated, programmatic capability that lowers the barrier to advanced AI methods across disciplines,” stated Sally C. Morton, government vice chairman of ASU Knowledge Enterprise. “By making these tools accessible and integrated into research workflows, we enable faculty and students to move faster from idea to insight. That’s core to Knowledge Enterprise: accelerating discovery and translating it into tangible impact at scale.”
ASU researchers, college and workers can entry AIR and the elevated AI compute capability by the college’s flagship AI software equipment CreateAI.
The AI research platform is accessible by CreateAI Builder, which provides a curated choice of main open‑supply giant language fashions and instruments similar to Google’s Gemma and Meta’ s Llama Scout. By connecting these fashions to expanded compute capability, the platform permits researchers and college students to construct customized AI experiences utilizing their very own data bases, information and directions.
This is a major milestone for the college to increase CreateAI Builder as a driver of ASU research and discovery. To date, the ASU neighborhood has developed over 8,000 customized AI experiences for lecturers, research and operations utilizing CreateAI Builder.
In addition to serving ASU researchers, the AIR Platform additionally positions ASU to contribute to nationwide priorities in AI — advancing innovation, scientific discovery and financial improvement.
Supercharging research computing
“The technology introduces a new type of high-performance computing capacity,” stated Sean Dudley, affiliate vice chairman at Knowledge Enterprise who leads the Research Technology Office. “This technology enables us to support thousands of additional users that are developing or engaging generative AI models while shifting these workloads off our existing resources to free them up for other computationally intensive projects.”
Prior to the donation, the college operated a whole lot of the newest NVIDIA GPUs, which kind the spine of ASU’s Sol supercomputer, a system ranked among the world’s Top500. The AI accelerator chips increase and diversify college supercomputing sources.
The scale of this growth permits ASU researchers to privately pursue tasks in-house that might beforehand require computing sources from costly and in-demand nationwide supercomputing methods. An additional advantage is privateness. By managing this new platform as a regional cloud providing, the college is totally ready to defend and handle its information.
“This allows our researchers to securely execute and rapidly iterate complicated, large-scale generative AI projects,” Dudley stated.
Powering research and training
In June 2025, College of Health Solutions Professor Jianming Liang developed an AI software referred to as Ark+ to assist physicians interpret chest X-rays more accurately. The mannequin was educated on greater than six public datasets of medical pictures, together with detailed doctor notes, permitting it to establish frequent, uncommon and rising ailments.
Liang needs to construct upon this research with the computational energy of the AI accelerator chips. He’s hoping to make the most of greater than 1,000 datasets to prepare a brand new mannequin that may establish ailments all through the physique — not simply these detected by chest imaging. In addition, his plans for the brand new mannequin couldn’t solely establish ailments but in addition exactly find them and their affected areas.
Intel’s donation can also be shaping how synthetic intelligence is taught at ASU.
Suren Jayasuriya, affiliate professor in The GAME School and the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, included the AI accelerators into his deep learning class. Students have been assigned a challenge to benchmark machine studying workloads on AI accelerators in contrast to GPUs.
Apply AI to your work
The subsequent part in realizing the potential of the donation is adoption. Expanded college computing capabilities frees researchers from earlier constraints, encouraging extra bold, data-intensive research throughout disciplines — and opens new alternatives for employees and college students to apply AI to their work.
To be taught extra about incorporating AI into research, contact the Research Computing Office for a consultation.